94 THEISLAND ACADIANS

and the least esteemed of all public servants'*.

Due to a shortage of funds in the early days, people in the district took turns providing teachers with room and board. This practice was not likely to enhance the public image of this important profession, as Inspector John McNeill explains:

1 must also mention another practice which is too prevalent in the country, and which I conceive to be exceedingly injurious to the respectability of the teacher in the eyes of his pupils, and consequently hurtful to his usefulness — that is, receiving his board by going from house to house, in which case, he is regarded, both by parents and children, as little better than a common menial. . .'°°

The overall situation of teachers in Acadian schools was perhaps even more lamentable. Obviously qualified teachers were hard to find since there was no institution where Acadian teachers could receive training in French. Therefore ratepayers had to be content with people who could reasonably manage the basic skills of reading, writing, grammar and arithmetic.

A SEPARATE PEOPLE

In the course of the fifty years that followed the deportation, Acadians sought to rebuild a homeland and reunite a society scattered throughout the world. Those who came back to establish themselves on fle Saint Jean suffered innumerable hardships caused by the land tenure system and were forced to resettle several times. The Acadian population was thus split into small groups scattered over the Island and the mainland. The moves from one area to another weakened the demographic and geographic concentration of the Acadian com- munity which was gradually surrounded by, and even intermingled with, people of another culture and another language.

However, cultural and linguistic assimilation was not yet a reality. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the entire Acadian popu- lation on the Island succeeded quite well in closing itself off from outside cultural influences, despite the fact that it was broken up into small communities relatively isolated from one another. These people held on doggedly to their language and apparently were not